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Leonard Nimoy

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The Dominion War brought out the worst in Starfleet, but it's no different than essentially every war fought by anyone ever. The Cardassian War brought out the worst in Robert Maxwell. Old antagonisms against the Klingons brought out racism in Kirk. Shadows of the Romulan War impeded the crew in Balance of Terror. Just as war is important, in each and every single example, is how our heroes regain their humanity after that.

During the 1990's, it was a time dealing with the problems with subjects like war. Recall, Deep Space 9 was a dark side of what history can give us. If Deep Space 9 did not have a war, I think the show would have ended around the third season.

The Dominion War brought out the worst in Starfleet, but it's no different than essentially every war fought by anyone ever. The Cardassian War brought out the worst in Robert Maxwell. Old antagonisms against the Klingons brought out racism in Kirk. Shadows of the Romulan War impeded the crew in Balance of Terror. Just as war is important, in each and every single example, is how our heroes regain their humanity after that.

During the 1990's, it was a time dealing with the problems with subjects like war. Recall, Deep Space 9 was a dark side of what history can give us. If Deep Space 9 did not have a war, I think the show would have ended around the third season.

What 1990s did you live through? It was the end of the Cold War, and an era of (relative) peace, except for the occasional act of terrorism.
And the war did not even start until the end of season 5, so I don't think it's likely it would have ended in season 3 without the war.

What 1990s did you live through? It was the end of the Cold War, and an era of (relative) peace, except for the occasional act of terrorism.
And the war did not even start until the end of season 5, so I don't think it's likely it would have ended in season 3 without the war.

Deep Space 9 was building to some type of military conflict before season 5 started. in fact, it start with building a military conflict during the pilot. deep Space 9 was a very dark side of the federation. The federation in a area outside of the federation, as Bajor was not a member of the federation. In fact, Deep Space 9 started out to be in orbit around Bajor.

With DS9 being around the most stable wormhole and to the other side of the galaxy it was a very important military outpost. DS9, was not a federation space station, it was built by someone else and had secrets the federation did not know about.

Also I know that's how the writers went with DS9, but I think The Next Generation would have solved the Dominion War in one episode. That was their style after all. Probably through diplomacy or speechification.

The Dominion would have made for some lame villains if they could be convinced not go to war with one speech. Not all societies want peace, some want war. Chamberlain tried to use diplomatic methods to avoid a war with Nazi Germany and that failed completely. Diplomacy only works the other side isn't hell bent to start a war.

The Dominion War brought out the worst in Starfleet, but it's no different than essentially every war fought by anyone ever. The Cardassian War brought out the worst in Robert Maxwell. Old antagonisms against the Klingons brought out racism in Kirk. Shadows of the Romulan War impeded the crew in Balance of Terror. Just as war is important, in each and every single example, is how our heroes regain their humanity after that.

During the 1990's, it was a time dealing with the problems with subjects like war. Recall, Deep Space 9 was a dark side of what history can give us. If Deep Space 9 did not have a war, I think the show would have ended around the third season.

What 1990s did you live through? It was the end of the Cold War, and an era of (relative) peace, except for the occasional act of terrorism.
And the war did not even start until the end of season 5, so I don't think it's likely it would have ended in season 3 without the war.

Realtive peace aside from

The Gulf War
Kosovo War
Bosnian War

to name but 3 that NATO was involved in, there were also plenty of civil wars, and other conflicts that NATO did not take part in.

__________________
On the continent of wild endeavour in the mountains of solace and solitude there stood the citadel of the time lords, the oldest and most mighty race in the universe looking down on the galaxies below sworn never to interfere only to watch.

During the 1990's, it was a time dealing with the problems with subjects like war. Recall, Deep Space 9 was a dark side of what history can give us. If Deep Space 9 did not have a war, I think the show would have ended around the third season.

What 1990s did you live through? It was the end of the Cold War, and an era of (relative) peace, except for the occasional act of terrorism.
And the war did not even start until the end of season 5, so I don't think it's likely it would have ended in season 3 without the war.

Realtive peace aside from

The Gulf War
Kosovo War
Bosnian War

to name but 3 that NATO was involved in, there were also plenty of civil wars, and other conflicts that NATO did not take part in.

to name but 3 that NATO was involved in, there were also plenty of civil wars, and other conflicts that NATO did not take part in.

Someone in the military, that just studies the military was on television a few years back. I cannot recall his name or the program. If I am right with his words, at any given time there is more than 20 wars or civil wars going on at any given time. A good point would be Africa, when almost every country has been fighting some type of civil war since independence. Problem of the end of the British Empire, never teach the local population, and design borders in Europe then what really should have been done.

DS9 generally gets high marks for earning its dramatic twists and not asking the audience to accept implausibilities just because the plotline needs them to, but that wasn't one of DS9's better moments in terms of writing.

That's one of the elements which makes DS9 the strongest of the Trek shows, IMHO. TNG feels dated nowadays when I go back and watch; everyone is just too nice, and they tend to agree on everything in the end. DS9 was all about getting to the meat of real philosophical and personal disagreements (particularly ones which were not always immediately commensurable), starting from the end of Season One, in 'In the Hands of the Prophets'.

sonak wrote:

that's why I said relative peace.

Thing is, relative compared to what?

Europe was at peace from 1945 to 1989, even though you had two opposing blocs staring each other down straight down the middle. The actual violence was constrained, on the threat of MAD, to proxy wars in non-aligned states. Not exactly peaceful, but not exactly war, either. And you didn't have the concept of the 'failed state', because even states with tenuous and vague institutional systems were propped up generously by either the US or the USSR.

Compare that to what you had after the Soviet Union collapsed. To back what Ezri D and MacLeod have been pointing out, the breakup of Yugoslavia (and the street violence and ultranationalist militias slaughtering people on all sides) occurred just when the idea that a land war in Europe was, to many military and academic minds, unthinkable. (Of course, the violence in Yugoslavia was egged on by the Western 'advisors' and international bodies who wanted to see the last Communist country fall apart, but that's another point...) Somalia broke down. Rwanda ripped itself apart and killed (conservatively) 800,000 people in the process. Afghanistan became, under the joke that was the Peshawar Accord, a proxy-war playground between the Saudis and the Iranians.

So the question is, which is more 'relatively' peaceful? Are we speaking in objective terms, or in subjective ones?

My hypothesis is that it is only because we - in the United States and Europe, primarily - do not now feel actively threatened with immanent destruction lest we make a wrong step that the world feels more peaceful (or did in the '90's).

Europe was at peace from 1945 to 1989, even though you had two opposing blocs staring each other down straight down the middle. The actual violence was constrained, on the threat of MAD, to proxy wars in non-aligned states. Not exactly peaceful, but not exactly war, either. And you didn't have the concept of the 'failed state', because even states with tenuous and vague institutional systems were propped up generously by either the US or the USSR.

Compare that to what you had after the Soviet Union collapsed. To back what Ezri D and MacLeod have been pointing out, the breakup of Yugoslavia (and the street violence and ultranationalist militias slaughtering people on all sides) occurred just when the idea that a land war in Europe was, to many military and academic minds, unthinkable. (Of course, the violence in Yugoslavia was egged on by the Western 'advisors' and international bodies who wanted to see the last Communist country fall apart, but that's another point...) Somalia broke down. Rwanda ripped itself apart and killed (conservatively) 800,000 people in the process. Afghanistan became, under the joke that was the Peshawar Accord, a proxy-war playground between the Saudis and the Iranians.

What about relative to the entire history of humanity?

The XX century was the most peaceful century in history (followed by the XIX century) - despite the world wars, proxy wars, civil wars, Yugoslavian war, etc.

A far larger part of humanity was at peace in the XX century (XIX century) than at any other time in history.
History is just that war-filled.
For example, at present, we take for granted that wars between developed countries are very rare and that wars mostly happen in third world countries; in reality, that's an absolute novelty.

Europe was at peace from 1945 to 1989, even though you had two opposing blocs staring each other down straight down the middle. The actual violence was constrained, on the threat of MAD, to proxy wars in non-aligned states. Not exactly peaceful, but not exactly war, either. And you didn't have the concept of the 'failed state', because even states with tenuous and vague institutional systems were propped up generously by either the US or the USSR.

Compare that to what you had after the Soviet Union collapsed. To back what Ezri D and MacLeod have been pointing out, the breakup of Yugoslavia (and the street violence and ultranationalist militias slaughtering people on all sides) occurred just when the idea that a land war in Europe was, to many military and academic minds, unthinkable. (Of course, the violence in Yugoslavia was egged on by the Western 'advisors' and international bodies who wanted to see the last Communist country fall apart, but that's another point...) Somalia broke down. Rwanda ripped itself apart and killed (conservatively) 800,000 people in the process. Afghanistan became, under the joke that was the Peshawar Accord, a proxy-war playground between the Saudis and the Iranians.

What about relative to the entire history of humanity?

The XX century was the most peaceful century in history (followed by the XIX century) - despite the world wars, proxy wars, civil wars, Yugoslavian war, etc.

A far larger part of humanity was at peace in the XX century (XIX century) than at any other time in history.
History is just that war-filled.
For example, at present, we take for granted that wars between developed countries are very rare and that wars mostly happen in third world countries; in reality, that's an absolute novelty.

However many of those conflicts did not invovle what we call the western nations (US, UK, Europe, Canada, Australia, NZ etc..) so perhaps it was not so much it was more peacful it's just that the effects of those conflicts were not felt as much by those countries.

Even going back to the 1980's there were a fair few conflicts, but that era was dominated by the cold war. I remember watching the Fall of the Berlin Wall, realisng that it marked a turning point in the cold war, i.e that it was coming to an end. Some people on this board will not have yet been born or be too young to realise what a turning point in History that event was.

__________________
On the continent of wild endeavour in the mountains of solace and solitude there stood the citadel of the time lords, the oldest and most mighty race in the universe looking down on the galaxies below sworn never to interfere only to watch.

Europe was at peace from 1945 to 1989, even though you had two opposing blocs staring each other down straight down the middle. The actual violence was constrained, on the threat of MAD, to proxy wars in non-aligned states. Not exactly peaceful, but not exactly war, either. And you didn't have the concept of the 'failed state', because even states with tenuous and vague institutional systems were propped up generously by either the US or the USSR.

Compare that to what you had after the Soviet Union collapsed. To back what Ezri D and MacLeod have been pointing out, the breakup of Yugoslavia (and the street violence and ultranationalist militias slaughtering people on all sides) occurred just when the idea that a land war in Europe was, to many military and academic minds, unthinkable. (Of course, the violence in Yugoslavia was egged on by the Western 'advisors' and international bodies who wanted to see the last Communist country fall apart, but that's another point...) Somalia broke down. Rwanda ripped itself apart and killed (conservatively) 800,000 people in the process. Afghanistan became, under the joke that was the Peshawar Accord, a proxy-war playground between the Saudis and the Iranians.

What about relative to the entire history of humanity?

The XX century was the most peaceful century in history (followed by the XIX century) - despite the world wars, proxy wars, civil wars, Yugoslavian war, etc.

A far larger part of humanity was at peace in the XX century (XIX century) than at any other time in history.
History is just that war-filled.
For example, at present, we take for granted that wars between developed countries are very rare and that wars mostly happen in third world countries; in reality, that's an absolute novelty.

Just wait til those last 3 and 1/2 years. You aint seen shed blood til that one.

Photon, with all the wars and atrocities you mentioned (and the ones you didn't mention) taken into account, the XX century STILL is the most peaceful in history.

Life in the past was just that brutish, violent and short.
We just tend to picture it in a ridiculously romanticised frame - in part because the closer to the present an era is, the more details about it we learn/remember.

T'Girl wrote:

Edit_XYZ wrote:

A far larger part of humanity was at peace in the XX century (XIX century) than at any other time in history.

In all of Human history up to the turn of the twentieth century, 41 million people were killed in wars. In the twentieth century alone 169 million (at least) were killed in wars.

Edit XYZ, your statement makes absolutely no sense, what are you talking about?

Yes, let's bring some numbers into the discussion.

In absolute numbers, what were the worst atrocities in history?
Let's see (deaths include battlefield deaths and indirect deaths of civilians by starvation or disease; each death toll is the median of the figure cited in a large number of histories and encyclopedias):

A few observations - of these 21 worst atrocities, 14 were in centuries before the XX. Did you know there were 5 wars and 4 atrocities before WW1 that killed more people than that war?
T'Girl - your naive "41 million killed in wars before the XX century" doesn't even come close to the number of deaths caused only by these top 14 atrocities committed before the XX century (or even by the wars among them).
And all this pertains to absolute numbers.
Of course, these were only the worst, the peak of the iceberg; there were thousands upon thousands of wars, genocides, etc (as in not merely small skirmishes) committed during the banal horror of human history. Our ancestors were not even close to being as reluctant as us in starting wars, eradicating this or that ethnic group, etc.

What if we take into account the total population of those times - and ask how large a percent of the total population was killed in those 21 atrocities?
Let's see - with the death toll adjusted to mid-XX century equivalent:

Wouldn't a better definition of peacful be the number of days/years where a war wasn't going on somewhere?

__________________
On the continent of wild endeavour in the mountains of solace and solitude there stood the citadel of the time lords, the oldest and most mighty race in the universe looking down on the galaxies below sworn never to interfere only to watch.